How Strong is the Union?
Posted by: unclesmrgol
Over on HotAir, this comment has been blocked by the automated software:
This is where I disagree. Yes, the entire union would have been destroyed with or without the growth of government had the Southern states successfully seceded. However, the North could have continued in existence even had the South seceded. Why government needed to grow in order for the Union States to survive is not clear to me.
MeatHeadinCA on January 24, 2010 at 2:12 AM
Ah, but the United States would have ceased to exist.
That's where we differ -- I, as Lincoln, count the United States as being all those states in the Union. Any attempt to leave the Union breaks the Union, and denies the citizens in the faction breaking away the protection of the laws of the Union.
Again, the Union was designed to be far stronger than a Confederation, and the Constitution shows it. Once in, you cannot leave.
The South presented a military threat to the Union. It had fired upon the Union, had occupied its military installations. War was inevitable. With war comes government growth. Each war we have fought has been fought by taxing the citizens; each war requires supplies, transport, and men, and none of those three are free.
Comments
My comment is not about this post in particular, but about your efforts in general, prompted by your contributions in Hot Air's Nick Gillespie thread:
You really need to learn the difference between normative and descriptive statements. You need to learn what a tautology is. You need to learn the meanings of words and terms as they're generally understood by others. And you need to learn basic logic so that you can properly tie it all together.
Most of all, though, you need to become acutely aware of the premises on which your arguments are operating. This is your real hang-up, I think, and it's the reason you got slaughtered in that whole smoking tangent.
There are flaws and logical fallacies in nearly every one your comments in that thread. Now, granted, that thread isn't exactly a model of precision and rigorous thinking; the thinking there is so messy, it's practically painful. But your posts were particularly bad, which is why I felt compelled to point it out.
The truth is that smoking bans DO infringe rights: the rights of property owners. Now, you may see this as a defensible violation of rights. You may even see it as a necessary one. But to make a watertight argument, you must acknowledge this. It is the ONLY way you can then construct an argument that logically holds up from front to back.
You could have made a sterling, indomitable contribution to that thread. You could have left your opponents -- pardon the pun -- gasping for air.
Instead, because you failed to precisely grasp your own premises, you spent your time dancing in circles, getting your feet increasingly tangled, weakening as you went. Your unwitting distortion of the Jefferson quote was perhaps the most glaring example, but it was just one of many.
I am a conservative. With age, I've come to realize that the biggest threat to this country comes not from progressives, but from people like you -- people who profess to be on the side of right but who are deeply, irreparably confused.
Progressives can ultimately be stopped, because their principles cannot sustain in the long term, and so holes can be punctured in their project with relative ease. The real danger comes from your ilk -- those who do not actually understand the principles they claim to stand for, and whose resulting confusion creates an impenetrable wall around liberty, morality and justice. The saddest part is that people like you are the victims of progressivism, and it has rendered you an even more dire threat than progressivism itself. Sad AND ironic, I guess.
This comment won't nudge you, I know. You won't see any light, and you certainly won't change your ways. It's probably literally impossible: I don't think your mind is capable of grasping what needs to be grasped. And that's not an insult. You're just a human being who's like most human beings. I'm flawed too, in my own contemptible ways.
It's just yet another sign that there's no perfect way to do any of this; democracy is the enemy of liberty, yet putting them together is the best we've got, because everything else is worse.
(As reference for future Googlers, the aforementioned Hot Air thread is here: http://hotair.com/archives/... )
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You really need to learn the difference between normative and descriptive statements. You need to learn what a tautology is. You need to learn the meanings of words and terms as they're generally understood by others. And you need to learn basic logic so that you can properly tie it all together.
Most of all, though, you need to become acutely aware of the premises on which your arguments are operating. This is your real hang-up, I think, and it's the reason you got slaughtered in that whole smoking tangent.
There are flaws and logical fallacies in nearly every one your comments in that thread. Now, granted, that thread isn't exactly a model of precision and rigorous thinking; the thinking there is so messy, it's practically painful. But your posts were particularly bad, which is why I felt compelled to point it out.
The truth is that smoking bans DO infringe rights: the rights of property owners. Now, you may see this as a defensible violation of rights. You may even see it as a necessary one. But to make a watertight argument, you must acknowledge this. It is the ONLY way you can then construct an argument that logically holds up from front to back.
You could have made a sterling, indomitable contribution to that thread. You could have left your opponents -- pardon the pun -- gasping for air.
Instead, because you failed to precisely grasp your own premises, you spent your time dancing in circles, getting your feet increasingly tangled, weakening as you went. Your unwitting distortion of the Jefferson quote was perhaps the most glaring example, but it was just one of many.
I am a conservative. With age, I've come to realize that the biggest threat to this country comes not from progressives, but from people like you -- people who profess to be on the side of right but who are deeply, irreparably confused.
Progressives can ultimately be stopped, because their principles cannot sustain in the long term, and so holes can be punctured in their project with relative ease. The real danger comes from your ilk -- those who do not actually understand the principles they claim to stand for, and whose resulting confusion creates an impenetrable wall around liberty, morality and justice. The saddest part is that people like you are the victims of progressivism, and it has rendered you an even more dire threat than progressivism itself. Sad AND ironic, I guess.
This comment won't nudge you, I know. You won't see any light, and you certainly won't change your ways. It's probably literally impossible: I don't think your mind is capable of grasping what needs to be grasped. And that's not an insult. You're just a human being who's like most human beings. I'm flawed too, in my own contemptible ways.
It's just yet another sign that there's no perfect way to do any of this; democracy is the enemy of liberty, yet putting them together is the best we've got, because everything else is worse.
(As reference for future Googlers, the aforementioned Hot Air thread is here: http://hotair.com/archives/... )
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You view my interpretation of Jefferson's First Inaugural Address as being in error. For the record, here is the quote we are disputing:<blockquote>Still one thing more, fellow-citizens?a wise and frugal Government, <b>which shall restrain men from injuring one another</b>, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.</blockquote>
Again, I state -- <b><font color="red">Your right to smoke ends where my breathing space begins.</font></b> As the injured person, I have the absolute right to appeal to my Government for redress. You don't like it? Move to another country.
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Again, I state -- <b><font color="red">Your right to smoke ends where my breathing space begins.</font></b> As the injured person, I have the absolute right to appeal to my Government for redress. You don't like it? Move to another country.
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You know what's weird about you? It's as if you don't notice something that's really obvious: THOMAS JEFFERSON DIDN'T TRY TO ENACT SMOKING BANS.
The part where you're getting screwed up -- or that you're taking for granted -- is this assumption that you have a "right" to be somewhere: a bar, a restaurant, etc.
This is the faulty premise from which your argument's problems all follow.
If you run machine tools in your garage, and I come wandering in of my own accord, and a bunch of sparks fly into my eyes, then I have been injured. That stinks. But it's not the government's role to step in and ban you from working with your tools in your garage.
You're deeply, deeply confused. Jefferson was not speaking of every conceivable situation in which men could happen to be injured by others. If I run into your house while you're chopping carrots and stick my hand under your knife, then you will have "injured" me. If I stick my wet hand in your toaster while you plug it in, you will have "injured" me.
In each of these situations, *I* have led to my own injuries by placing myself in a situation to be injured -- on YOUR property. And that's exactly what happens when I walk into your bar and stick my head in your cloud of smoke: I am voluntarily bringing the injury onto myself.
I would NEVER insist that society gang up and keep you from running tools, chopping carrots, using toasters, or lighting a cigarette on YOUR property. Thomas Jefferson wouldn't have either.
You don't understand what liberty is. You don't understand that it is a real principle, with real meaning, and that it's not just some thing for you to toy around with at your convenience. You're just another wannabe tyrant who asserts a claim on the lives of other human beings.
As I said in my first post above, I already know this won't budge you. You are incapable of understanding this stuff, because you're so wedded to your myopic worldview. You will go to your deathbed figuring that you have a claim on the lives of other humans. Then you will be gone. And we can only hope and trust that with our generation died off, the humans of the future will remember what certain humans in the past -- like Thomas Jefferson -- had already figured out: that man has natural liberty, and that government's only role is to protect it.
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The part where you're getting screwed up -- or that you're taking for granted -- is this assumption that you have a "right" to be somewhere: a bar, a restaurant, etc.
This is the faulty premise from which your argument's problems all follow.
If you run machine tools in your garage, and I come wandering in of my own accord, and a bunch of sparks fly into my eyes, then I have been injured. That stinks. But it's not the government's role to step in and ban you from working with your tools in your garage.
You're deeply, deeply confused. Jefferson was not speaking of every conceivable situation in which men could happen to be injured by others. If I run into your house while you're chopping carrots and stick my hand under your knife, then you will have "injured" me. If I stick my wet hand in your toaster while you plug it in, you will have "injured" me.
In each of these situations, *I* have led to my own injuries by placing myself in a situation to be injured -- on YOUR property. And that's exactly what happens when I walk into your bar and stick my head in your cloud of smoke: I am voluntarily bringing the injury onto myself.
I would NEVER insist that society gang up and keep you from running tools, chopping carrots, using toasters, or lighting a cigarette on YOUR property. Thomas Jefferson wouldn't have either.
You don't understand what liberty is. You don't understand that it is a real principle, with real meaning, and that it's not just some thing for you to toy around with at your convenience. You're just another wannabe tyrant who asserts a claim on the lives of other human beings.
As I said in my first post above, I already know this won't budge you. You are incapable of understanding this stuff, because you're so wedded to your myopic worldview. You will go to your deathbed figuring that you have a claim on the lives of other humans. Then you will be gone. And we can only hope and trust that with our generation died off, the humans of the future will remember what certain humans in the past -- like Thomas Jefferson -- had already figured out: that man has natural liberty, and that government's only role is to protect it.
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Why would HA block your original post? There is nothing offensive about the post in my opinion.
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rukiddingme,
The HotAir engine has a bad words list. Among the bad words are "rebellion" and possibly "secession". You can try a post containing one of these words, and it will show you what I mean.
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The HotAir engine has a bad words list. Among the bad words are "rebellion" and possibly "secession". You can try a post containing one of these words, and it will show you what I mean.
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Thank you sir for your response. I do understand why it was blocked now. If you do not mind, I am going to e-mail you shortly
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